Contest Details

To participate in the contest, just complete the survey.  We will allow one full week before announcing the winners.  If you still have not tried Astrid, download it from the Android Market today.

• 1 Grand Prize winner – Selected from all eligible survey responses
• 3 Runner up winners – Best and most interesting story of how Astrid made your life better
• 1 Runner up winner – Best new feature suggestion
• July 20th, 2009 – Winners announced

Prizes

The grand prize for the survey is a free T-Mobile myTouch 3G.  All current T-Mobile customers are eligible to win the grand prize.  The winner should receive their phone by August 3rd, before everyone else.

• Grand prize:  T-Mobile myTouch 3G ($199 value)
• Runners up:  4x $25 Amazon.com gift cards

Take the Survey

Click below to launch the survey.

The survey is now live. Help us improve Astrid.

Astrid is an Android application that helps you get things done.  By creating a series of small tasks, you can work toward accomplishing a larger goal.  Astrid helps along the way by prioritizing your tasks, providing persuasive reminders, and synchronizing with your online accounts.  Currently, Astrid supports Remember The Milk and Google Calendar.  The latest update also ads location based support with Locale.

Look at what current Astrid users are saying:

• Wonderful! Works great with RTM. Easy to use and incredibly useful. A tip of my hat to the developers! – Danny 6-2-2009
• Seriously It’s so great. Does just what it says perfectly. – Victoria 5-31-2009
• Love it… makes me feel so productive! – Rachel 5-29-2009
• Luv this app. The pop up comments are hilarious and helpful.  Syncs up with RTM well. tons of useful features. – hulkingcow 5-24-2009
• Its just fantastic. reminds you of everything you need to do all the time. – Clement 5-21-2009

For more information on Astrid, check out their new site: weloveastrid.com

By participating in this challenge, we hope you discover an awesome application and help to improve it.  We want you to install the application and give us your thoughts on it.  At the end of the challenge, we will post a survey and ask about your experience with Astrid.  Since your time is valuable, we will be rewarding the grand prize winner with a free T-Mobile myTouch 3G.

Contest details

To participate in the challenge, simply use Astrid then fill out an online survey.  Based on the nature of the application, we will allow a full two weeks to get familiar with Astrid before we ask for your thoughts.  At the end of the challenge, we will publish an online survey and allow a few days for everyone to complete it.

• Contest is open to current T-Mobile USA customers
• June 29th, 2009 – Astrid survey contest begins
• July 13th, 2009 – Survey is published
• July 20th, 2009 – Grand Prize winner announced

Prizes

• Grand prize:  T-Mobile myTouch 3G ($199 value)
• Runners up:  4 prizes ($25 value)

How to install Astrid

There are several ways to install Astrid on your Android device.  The easiest method is to search the Market for Astrid, but we included all the options below:

• Open Android Market and search for Astrid.
• Here is the direct market link: Download to phone
• Use and Android application Barcode Scanner to scan the QR code located below.

Scan to download.

Side note: I know there are some weird lighting issues and there is a slight pattern in the display, but I’m working on it. This is my first video, let me know what you think and I’ll try to make improvements. Got an idea for a future video or something you want to see reviewed? Leave me a comment and I’ll add it to my review queue.

For those who requested a YouTube version, we put one up.

These are the applications currently in the market with more than the bare minimum functionality and good reviews: Astrid, RTM Tasks, TooDo, and 3banana. (Absent from this list is an application called ActionComplete, which sells for $4.99. The description says that it has meticulous attention to detail, but five dollars is too much for any to-do list, meticulous or not.)

Astrid

Astrid Home Screen

I’ll cut to the chase since you’ve got things to do. Astrid is the best to-do list manager available in the market. It’s attractive, intuitive, and it does everything you need it to do without getting in your way. You’ll be happy to hit that little squid icon a dozen times a day.

One of the best features – that I’ve never seen before – is how it checks off a task. When you hit the checkbox, it changes the task font to strikethrough and leaves it there until you exit the application. This is handy because you often hit the wrong task and you don’t want to have to re-enter it. This was a frustration with the built-in to-do lists on Windows Mobile and Palm. Four or five pixels up or down and you’ve got to remember what that task was and type it in again. It’s either gone, or it resides in your gigantic pool of completed tasks.

Astrid also does what you should be able to do with every to-do list manager: open it, type, close it, and it will add a new task. This is what a person does with the vast majority of his or her time with a to-do list and it is appropriately streamlined here.

There are also the requisite features like priority, alarms, recurring tasks, and tags, all of which Astrid does well. I also like the tabbed organization. If a task doesn’t have a due date or an alert, you can ignore those tabs and exit. Saving is always automatic.

Despite its utter dominance of the list-oriented market, I was disappointed by two aspects of the more modern versions of Astrid. Since they came out with the tabs, the application has been a bit slow. Personally, I think speed should be a higher priority than almost any fancy feature for these types of applications. Astrid also claims to synchronize with Remember The Milk, but I couldn’t get it to work, and, judging by the wiki, I wasn’t the only one.

RTM Tasks

RTM Tasks is a newer entry in the market and has very basic functionality. It is notable because it does, like the name implies, synchronize successfully with Remember The Milk. If you’re a big RTM fan, this might be the one to start with, at least until some others get their acts together. You can always switch later by synchronizing with the new one.

TooDo

TooDo Home Screen

TooDo is notable as the Titanic of to-do list managers for Android. It has a plethora of features and very little intuitiveness. Features like the dashboard, contexts (aren’t categories enough?), smart folders, distance intervals (a Geo-notification setting), and owner (there’s also author) are poorly defined and the interface gives us few hints. There is a setting called “Insistent” with this cryptic explanation: “Should a to-do notification with importance higher than Normal loop for ever?” Difficult to tell what you’re going to be subjected to with that one.

To impress upon you, the sheer number of features it’s offering, TooDo will add a persistent entry in your window shade with the following buttons: “Change,” “On,” “Main Screen,” “Smart Folders,” “Categories,” “Contexts,” “Notes,” “Demo mode,” “Go Lite,” “Sync,” and “Purge,” and, in the bottom left-hand corner, the lowly “Add to-do.”

The dashboard, as it’s called, also includes the message, “Go to the “Settings” for disabling,” which is probably what most users will immediately do.

Where Astrid is clean and clever looking, TooDo has “Animations.” This means that the items in each tab will disappear one by one when you switch to that tab. This little cascade is annoying and does not in any way further the to-do list users primary goal of getting things done. All-in-all, it seems as if the developer believed that this was a race to the record books for number of features, useful or not.

I was also not able to get Remember the Milk synchronization to work.

3banana

3banaa Home Screen

3banana is not actually a to-do list manager. It is a note taking and sharing application, but I thought it showed a lot of potential. The interface is clean and simple. You can begin typing right away into a dedicated text box at the top, add tags twitter style with the pound sign, and hit save to keep it in your list. You can also use the camera button next to the text box to attach a picture to the entry. The entry and the picture can then be saved and shared on Facebook or Twitter. I wasn’t able to get the synchronization with 3banana.com to work, where all of this social magic is supposed to happen, but if you create an entry on the site, it works fine from there. Once the synchronization starts working, this could become a fun socially-aware way to make lists, in addition to being a usable and fast to-do list manager on its own.